Former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe said he ordered an obstruction of justice investigation into President Trump after he fired FBI Director James Comey in the spring of 2017.
“I was very concerned that I was able to put the Russia case on absolutely solid ground, in an indelible fashion,” McCabe said in his first TV interview since getting fired from the bureau last year. “That were I removed quickly, or reassigned or fired, that the case could not be closed or vanish in the night without a trace.”
“I wanted to make sure that our case was on solid ground and if somebody came in behind me and closed it and tried to walk away from it, they would not be able to do that without creating a record of why they made that decision,” McCabe told CBS News’ “60 Minutes.”
Up until now it has only been reported that an obstruction of justice probe was opened as part of the Russia investigation into possible collusion between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin. The Washington Post first reported in June 2017 that special counsel Robert Mueller had begun looking into it and CNN later reported McCabe had initiated it and that it also included a look at Trump’s conversation with Comey, described in memos he wrote, in which the president asked his then-FBI director to drop an investigation into former national security adviser Michael Flynn.
The White House has called the inquiry a “completely baseless investigation.” Last year, the New York Times reported that Trump’s legal team argued in a memo making the case that the president could not be compelled to testify for the probe that a sitting president cannot legally obstruct an investigation because the Constitution empowers him to “terminate the inquiry, or even exercise his power to pardon if he so desired.”
The first clip of the interview with McCabe, set to air in full on Sunday, was shown Thursday on “CBS This Morning.” The correspondent who interviewed McCabe, Scott Pelley, said McCabe also told him Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein really did tell officials that he wanted to secretly record Trump and that he was recruiting Cabinet members to invoke the 25th Amendment to remove the president from office.
“McCabe in [the 60 Minutes] interview says no, it came up more than once and it was so serious that he took it to the lawyers at the FBI to discuss it,” Pelley said of the secret wire suggestion.
Rosenstein, who appointed Mueller to take over the Russia investigation after Comey was fired, has long been the subject of criticism of Trump-allied Republican lawmakers who have accused the Justice Department of being biased at the top levels due to document request disputes and reports in September that said he discussed wearing a “wire” to record conversations with Trump and that he was recruiting Cabinet members to invoke the 25th Amendment to remove the president from office.
Rosenstein denied the reporting, while sources told NBC News that he was only joking about secretly recording the president.
A Justice Department spokesperson reiterated the denial on Thursday.
“As to the specific portions of this interview provided to the Department of Justice by 60 Minutes in advance, the Deputy Attorney General again rejects Mr. McCabe’s recitation of events as inaccurate and factually incorrect,” A Justice Department spokesperson said in a statement. “The Deputy Attorney General never authorized any recording that Mr. McCabe references. As the Deputy Attorney General previously has stated, based on his personal dealings with the President, there is no basis to invoke the 25th Amendment, nor was the DAG in a position to consider invoking the 25th Amendment.”
The spokesperson further dismissed the idea of a coordinated effort between Rosenstein and Comey to appoint Mueller to take over the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election.
“Finally, the Deputy Attorney General never spoke to Mr. Comey about appointing a Special Counsel,” the spokesperson said. “The Deputy Attorney General in fact appointed Special Counsel Mueller, and directed that Mr. McCabe be removed from any participation in that investigation. Subsequent to his removal, DOJ’s Inspector General found that Mr. McCabe did not tell the truth to federal authorities on multiple occasions, leading to his termination from the FBI.”
McCabe, a 21-year veteran of the FBI who briefly served as acting FBI director after Comey was fired, has a book due out next week titled “The Threat: How the FBI Protects America in the Age of Terror and Trump.”
In his memoir, he writes Rosenstein spiraled into rage and paranoia after Trump ordered him to write the memo he cited as justification to fire Comey. In a private meeting at the Justice Department days after Comey was pushed out on May 12, McCabe writes Rosenstein was “glassy-eyed” and said he was sleep deprived after he came to the conclusion that the White House had used him. “He said it wasn’t his idea. The president had ordered him to write the memo justifying the firing,” McCabe writes. Rosenstein also said, “There’s no one here that I can trust.”
McCabe was fired on March 16, 2018, two days before he planned to retire on his 50th birthday and collect a full pension, after the Justice Department’s Office of the Inspector General determined that he misled investigators about the role he had in leaking information to the Wall Street Journal in October 2016 about the investigation into the Clinton Foundation.
He “lacked candor” on four occasions when interviewing with internal investigators, the IG report said.
In April, it was revealed that the Justice Department IG had referred its findings to the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington for possible criminal charges. Federal prosecutors used a grand jury to investigate McCabe.
CORRECTION: A previous version of this article contained a clause that said Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein has been fired when it has not been the case. The Washington Examiner regrets the error.
